How Feminist Activism Can Make States More Accountable for Women’s Rights (31 Mar 2015) | Andrea Cornwall, Jenny EdwardsDespite the gains made on women’s rights since the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, we still have a long way to go in terms of enjoying a gender-equal world. We also need to be vigilant against sliding back on progress already made. This article recognizes the crucial role women’s organizing plays in holding states to account on obligations made under international agreements. Drawing on examples from Brazil and Egypt from the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment programme, the article demonstrates the contribution of women’s organizing to: mobilizing around injustice, harnessing the power of ratified agreements to bring about change in legislation, working on the design of progressive laws, and then ensuring the laws are effectively implemented. In order to be truly successful, however, women’s organizing needs to be matched by responsive, effective government. It is only when citizen voice works in unison with the state that commitments made on women’s rights can be comprehensively achieved.

A Rights-Based Approach to Social Protection: The Case of Tunisia (18 Sep 2014) | Mehdi Ben Braham, Seynabou DiaTunisia today is at an important stage in its thinking about a new development model that combines optimal allocation of resources and social equity, welfare being an essential factor in the success of the democratic transition and at the core of the 2011 popular uprising. However, structural reform cannot be achieved in the absence of a clear framework and of precise objectives which need to result from national consensus. The human rights-based approach to social protection can offer this framework—which has long been lacking in Tunisia—and is also of growing importance at the international level because it promotes fairness and consensus whilst placing this paradigm in the continuity of the post-2015 Development Goals.

How to Upscale your Social Economy into a Trillion Dollar Global Market. The Convergence Paradox of Islamic Finance (1 May 2014) | Aaron Z. PitluckThe contemporary Islamic banking and finance industry provides a radical critique of finance as currently practiced. In spite of this moral stance, Islamic finance has expanded in a few short decades into a trillion dollar global market. Perhaps surprisingly, many Islamic finance products have converged in both quality and price with their conventional counterparts so that they have become outwardly identical. This convergence paradox has led critics to accuse banks of cynically marketing conventional financial products as Islamic.This research paints a subtler story. I have identified four social mechanisms that have contributed not only to Islamic finance’s economic upscaling, but have also contributed to its rapid convergence with the conventional sector. For proponents of social and solidarity economies, Islamic finance is an instructive cautionary tale of how to use the engine of capitalist innovation to upscale rapidly.